american

ULAB'S Department of English, in partnership with the US Embassy, Dhaka, is organizing a two-day interdisciplinary conference which seeks to examine the relationship between language and literature within the frame of English studies, and its impact on community.

Undergraduate and graduate students are encouraged to submit presentations for a conference that explores, challenges, and re-imagines the concept of identity.

This conference will allow students to present on a variety of issues and themes related to identity. Identity, in this context, can refer to an individual or group and comprises various registers—including race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexuality, nationality, ability, religion, political affiliation, etc. Also, identity can be explored in multiplicity: considering how certain identities impact others.

The intersection of the literary and the visual is fraught with questions pertaining to time. As Walter Benjamin and Mikhail Bahktin argue, technological advances that fragment or preserve time, like photography and cinema, have altered our modes of interaction with lived experience. Similarly, Nicholas Mirzeoff argues that visuality is contingent on the prevalence or rupture of temporal and spatial configurations. Mirzeoff, like Paul Gilroy, specifically emphasizes the concept of the chronotope, a conflation of time and space, as a means of communicating and deciphering lived experience in narrative structures. This panel welcomes papers on the concept of time vis-à-vis visuality in Modern and Contemporary American literature.

Special Session CFP: Reevaluating relationships between racial politics, aesthetics, and (non)canonicity in African American women's poetry from Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance. Topics might include, but are not limited to: thematic or aesthetic divisions within a poet's oeuvre and/or in contemporary scholarship, negotiations of audience and/or publishing venues, poetry of social protest, etc.

Please send a 250-word abstract and short bio to Heidi Morse (hemorse@umich.edu) by March 15, 2015 (extended deadline). The 2016 MLA will take place in Austin, TX from January 7-10.

The modernist period, as the theme of this year's conference suggests, was a period marked by revolutions of various stripes: aesthetic, social, cultural, and political. Among these, political revolutions often occupied center stage, both in terms of public awareness but also in terms of modernist praxis. Many modernists participated in radical political actions even as they experimented or facilitated experimentation with radical aesthetics.

When underground comix emerged in America in the 1970s, they were connected with the counter culture movement and rife with anti-establishment content. These comics participated in and addressed counterpublics, which queer theorist Michael Warner defines as "formed by their conflict with the norms and contexts of their cultural environment." Yet much of the scholarship of the underground comix movement has centered on straight white men located in San Francisco (e.g. R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson).